Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, in Washington May 13.

WASHINGTON (CNS)—When it comes to issues of religious freedom, Bill
Donohue thinks the Obama administration has put religious employers
between a rock and a hard place.

The president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was
among Catholics across the political spectrum commenting on the
Department of Health and Human Services' Aug. 1 announcement that
contraceptives and sterilization will be among the mandated preventive
services for women under the new health reform law.

HHS is proposing that only religious employers meeting four criteria
would be exempt from providing contraceptives and female sterilization
through their health plans. Those requirements are that the organization
"(1) has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose; (2)
primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets; (3) primarily
serves persons who share its religious tenets; and (4) is a nonprofit
organization" under specific sections of the Internal Revenue Code.

Donohue recalled that as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said
faith-based programs that receive government aid should not be allowed
to hire only members of their own faith, and since Obama has been in the
White House, Donohue said, various groups have lobbied the president to
"gut the religious liberty provision in hiring altogether."

"If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to
proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against
them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of their
religion," Obama said in a July 1, 2008, speech in Zanesville, Ohio.

Although Obama recently said he would not rescind an executive order
that permits federally funded religious organizations to "retain
religious terms in its organization's name, select its board members on a
religious basis and include religious references" in its mission
statement and governing documents, he said religious organizations
cannot discriminate in hiring "if you have set up a nonprofit that is
disassociated from your core religious functions and is out there in the
public doing all kinds of work."

"If, on the other hand, it is closer to your core functions as a
synagogue or a mosque or a church, then there may be more leeway for you
to hire somebody who is a believer of that particular religious faith,"
Obama added at a July 22, 2011, town hall meeting in Maryland.

"The Obama administration is playing Catch-22 with religious employers,"
Donohue said Aug. 2. "If they are too religious, Catholic social
service agencies risk losing federal funds, but if Catholic hospitals
are not sufficiently religious, they cannot be exempt from carrying
health insurance policies that transgress their religious tenets."

The announcement of the narrow "religious exemption" proposed by HHS --
and subject to a 60-day comment period -- has drawn strong criticism not
only from those known to oppose Obama and his health reform law.

Stephen S. Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research &
Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington,
said in a commentary published by National Catholic Reporter newspaper
before the Aug. 1 announcement that he had supported Obama's nomination
of then-Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to head HHS, even though she took a
"pro-choice stance on abortion."

"Those of us who supported Sebelius' nomination argued forcefully that
she should not be penalized because her conscience reached different
conclusions on contentious issues from those reached by the leaders of
the Catholic Church," Schneck wrote.

"But it would be a tragic irony if, in adopting the new rules, Sebelius
declined to afford to Catholic church organizations the same conscience
rights we invoked when defending her nomination," he added. "Those of us
who joined 'Catholics for Sebelius' did not do so to see our conscience
rights eviscerated."

Sister Carol Keehan also found fault with the conscience protections in the HHS guidelines.
"The language is not broad enough to protect our Catholic health
providers," said the president and CEO of the Catholic Health
Association, who was a key supporter of the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act.

Sister Carol, a member of the Daughters of Charity, said her
organization would submit written comments to HHS "and will continue our
dialogue with government officials on the essential need for adequate
conscience protections."

Writing in the Aug. 1 issue of America magazine, Catholic University
President John Garvey recalled U.S. President George Washington's letter
to a group of Quakers in 1789, in which he wrote, "In my opinion the
conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy
and tenderness: and it is my wish and desire that the laws may always be
as extensively accommodated to them, as a due regard for the protection
and essential interests of the nation may justify and permit."

"I think it is a point of pride for Americans that, even with the
differences we have had recently over many issues of health care, we
adhere so carefully to Washington's promise of conscientious
accommodation," Garvey said.

But, he added, "I worry that this distinguished record of liberal toleration might soon come to an end."

Garvey urged HHS to "consider our historical commitment to religious
liberty in deciding what kinds of services to mandate" under the new
health reform law.

"The administration promised that Americans who like their current
health care coverage could keep it after we enacted the new reform,"
Garvey noted. "Employers, employees and issuers who have moral and
religious objections to sterilization, contraception and abortion are
now free to have health care coverage that excludes these practices. It
would break both old and new promises to deprive them of that liberty."

Mercy Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, said on the USCCB media blog that the
HHS regulation "conveniently ignores the underlying principle of
Catholic charitable actions: We help people because we are Catholic, not
because our clients are."

"There's no need to show your baptismal certificate in the hospital
emergency room, the parish food pantry or the diocesan drug rehab
program," she wrote. "Or any place else the church offers help, either."

Sister Walsh said it makes no sense for Catholic Charities agencies to
"use money that would be better spent on feeding the poor to underwrite
services that violate church teachings."

"Whatever you think of artificial birth control, HHS' command that
everyone, including churches, must pay for it exalts ideology over
conscience and common sense," she said.